Launched in November 1995, RADARSAT-1 provided Canada and the world with an operational radar satellite system capable of timely delivery of large amounts of data. Equipped with a powerful synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument, it acquired images of the Earth day or night, in all weather and through cloud cover, smoke and haze.
RADARSAT-1 was a Canadian-led project involving the Canadian federal government, the Canadian provinces, the United States, and the private sector. It provided useful information to both commercial and scientific users in such fields as disaster management, interferometry, agriculture, cartography, hydrology, forestry, oceanography, ice studies and coastal monitoring.

In the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 32 ‘Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Systems: Monitoring, Modelling, and Data Assimilation’ (CRC/TR32, www.tr32.de), funded by the German Research Foundation from 2007 to 2018, a RDM system was self-designed and implemented. The so-called CRC/TR32 project database (TR32DB, www.tr32db.de) is operating online since early 2008. The TR32DB handles all data including metadata, which are created by the involved project participants from several institutions (e.g. Universities of Cologne, Bonn, Aachen, and the Research Centre Jülich) and research fields (e.g. soil and plant sciences, hydrology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, remote sensing). The data is resulting from several field measurement campaigns, meteorological monitoring, remote sensing, laboratory studies and modelling approaches. Furthermore, outcomes of the scientists such as publications, conference contributions, PhD reports and corresponding images are collected in the TR32DB.